What's the purpose of recording to an external drive?

[brianbfw]

Hello All,

I've always recorded direct to my main drive and never had any problems. I hear alot about you shouldn't do this, rather, you should record to an external drive.

what is the reason?

Also, i'm realatively new to the mac platform < 1yr. how do you defrag a Mac? Some people have told me you don't need to.

Thanks in advance.

brian

[DAS]

Three main reasons I can think of off hand (on no particular order):

1) Failure - The recording, editing, overdubbing, playback process puts a lot of strain on a drive. If a recording drive fails it's relatively easy to get back up and running...assuming you do backups. If that is also your system drive it is a lot harder.

2) Fragmentation - All of that shuttling data around tends to produce a lot of fragmentation. When intermixed with other more conventional applications the problem is compounded and both can suffer. Also, some recording applications can do some pretty unruly things to drive data (really, the empty space on a drive) when they crash...though this is less of an issue these days.

3) Performance/speed - If you record on a separate drive you can spend the money to get a high performance drive and use it for your audio data. No need to waste such a drive on filed e-mails. Additionally, while recording some applications may access program components from the application drive. Performance can be that little bit better if they are separate.

With all of this said, it is not something you truly have to do. If you have plenty of space on your system drive, and you can get the performance out of it you need then you'll be okay...for a while. I strongly recommend you not get that drive more than 60% to 70% full while operating this way, as that tends to compound all of the above problems. In fact, even on a dedicated recording drive I recommend making other arrangements when it gets past 80% full. All of these things are somewhat less of an issue with high quality drives and enclosures, but still something to pay attention to.

Hope this helps.

[brianbfw]

thanks, yes it does.

latency is a concern to me. i have the apogee system with logic, so i'm down to 1.6ms.

i thought internal HD were faster than external.

Using and ext HD with USB 2.0 , could that introduce latency?

i play classical and flamenco guitar, so i have to overdub very fast phrases, 16th's etc., so i need ultra ultra low latency. the symphony system provides me with that.

but i defintely don't want to risk my main drive. i am getting close to 50% capacity.

[Justin]

Another point of clarification: You don't have to record to an external drive. It just helps to record to any drive that isn't shared with your OS and programs.
So lots of people record to 2nd internal drives to get better track count and so they have less problems with the OS and recording process fighting over the drive.

You can record to the OS drive...but occasionally you'll see reduced track count or pops and clicks because you're sharing the drive between two different uses.

[DAS]

Drive speed doesn't necessarily have a direct impact on latency, but if the performance is bad enough you will find that you have to use larger buffer settings to keep things rolling, which as I'm sure you know does mean more latency. So faster drive throughput gives you a little more headroom to work the software harder in other areas (plug-ins, track count, etc.).

[tech1]

1) Failure - The recording, editing, overdubbing, playback process puts a lot of strain on a drive. If a recording drive fails it's relatively easy to get back up and running...assuming you do backups. If that is also your system drive it is a lot harder.
In your situation, brian, this is the primary reason why you would want to. I actually use 3 drives on my system at home; an OS drive, a data drive, and a backup drive. I have an OS image saved to the data drive for easy recovery in case of a drive failure, and I have current projects backed up on the backup drive. That way, if any of the three drives fails, I have the data somewhere else.

A good rule of thumb I like to share is this: Digital media doesn't really exist unless it stored in at least 2 places at the same time. A second (or third) hard drive helps youfollow this.

[aitikin]

Basically, the best reason I've heard for you to use another hard drive is the simple fact that the OS makes a bunch of calls to files on the primary drive. Using an external is fine, but I highly recommend firewire over usb for a hard drive. USB can do 480 Mb/s, yes, but solely in burst speeds. Firewire can do 400Mb/s at constant speeds. USB really only does around 250 Mb/s at a constant speed.

As for defragging, it isn't entirely necessary on OS X, so the OS only does it when you install new software. That whole "Optimizing System Performance" does a number of things, but most notably is defragmentation. As others have pointed out, the more backups, the better.